West Redding couple donate insect collection to Peabody

News-Times, The (Danbury, CT)

Published
8:00 pm EDT, Saturday, August 23, 2008

"We collected these in Limon Cocha in Ecuador in 1979," he said. "Remember?"

"Like yesterday," she said, smiling softly.

For more than 30 years, the DeMasis have traveled the world, snaring butterflies, bugs and beetles. They started their collection when they met in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia in the 1970s, then added specimens from South, Central and North America, including many found near their home in West Redding.

But a collection of 20,000 butterflies isn't easy to keep at home -- mold and mildew can creep into the best-kept collection box.

And the DeMasis' fervor for netting the brilliant things that flutter past has slowed a bit.

In part, that's because they've turned their attention to other areas of lepidoptery.

It's also because the things you do in your 20s and 30s get a little harder when you're in your 50s.

"Collecting is very hard physical work," DeMasi said. "It means going through a lot of swamps and forests. When you get a few years on your belt, it's not as easy."

It's now slowly integrating them into its vast collection of about 1.5 million insects. They include owl butterflies as big as bats; many morphos, and trays of small orange skippers DeMasi caught near his home.

These insects are all stored behind the scenes, in a temperature- and humidity-controlled room, out of the light that would otherwise bleach out butterflies' often-brilliant color.

But having it on hand is important for science, said Leonard Munstermann, curator of the entomology division at the Peabody.

"We have collections that date back more than 100 years," he said. "And we can learn things about the environment and how it is changing by seeing what species lived there at a certain time."

"Butterflies are like markers of the environment,'' Metowski said. "If you find desert species in certain places where they haven't been, that means there's decertification going on."

"Connecticut used to be a state almost without trees 150 years ago," Munstermann said. "Now it's mostly forested, with urban centers mixed in. The species of butterflies we find here now have changed because of that.

"We have about 12,000 insect species in the state, and each has a different niche and each can be used to track that niche."

Munstermann said the Peabody Museum's collection, while rich in specimens from the New World, isn't as strong when it comes to East Africa, where the couple spent more than two years gathering specimens.

"This fills in a very important niche for us," he said.

And Larry Gall, a lepidopterist who is one of the editors of the Connecticut Butterfly Atlas and the head of the Peabody's computer and informational technology division, said DeMasi has made a contribution to the knowledge of Connecticut's butterflies.

"He's been collecting in one spot for a long time, so he's got a good understanding of what's happened there," he said of DeMasi's work in Fairfield County.

DeMasi became fascinated by field biology when he was studying zoology at the University of San Francisco. Under the strict tutelage of Edward Kessler -- one of the country's most noted biologists -- he learned how to do the work correctly, carefully, gathering data on each bug he collected, including labels that recorded the time and place where he found each thing.

That exactitude in writing down data is one of the things that makes the couple's collection so valuable today.

"I can remember Kessler throwing things out that students had collected that weren't labeled correctly," DeMasi said.

When he got to Ethiopia as a Peace Corps volunteer, he planned to collect beetles. But the only field guide he could find described the country's butterflies.

"I got hooked," he said.

When their two years of service ended, the two moved on to Kenya and Tanzania to continue collecting. There, Metowski learned it took dung beetles only a few minutes to totally colonize a fresh pile of droppings.

"We used to drive through piles of elephant dung in our Volkswagen to break them up," she said. "There were an amazing number of insects in them."

They learned to bait butterfly traps, which they'd hoist high into the treetops to catch specimens. DeMasi also learned that local women would retrieve the drum-shaped traps from the trees and fashion them into hats.

The couple figured they'd return to the United States with a killer collection, which they could sell at a serious profit. Instead, they learned it was more satisfying to keep what they found.

When they moved to Redding, DeMasi befriended Charles Remington, who had organized the Peabody's entomology collection.

"He was a god of lepidoptery," DeMasi said.

Through that friendship, DeMasi began to volunteer at the Peabody in 1977. By 1990, the museum began paying him a stipend for his work. When he's not involved with insects, he's a painter and decorator who specializes in trompe-l'oeil work. His company is named Monarch, after the butterfly.

"I use a butterfly as my signature," he said.

The couple continued their field work in Central America, South America, and the South and Southwestern U.S., taking their two daughters with them. They learned that in tropical regions, a combination of mashed bananas, beer and sugar was an irresistible lure for butterflies, which would zoom in to feed at their traps.

"We learned we could leave little piles of it on the jungle floor on top of little cut-up pages from Newsweek," Metowski said. "We'd leave a little trail, like Hansel and Gretel.

"They'd eat so much, it was like they were staggering away."

In recent years, DeMasi was a major contributor to the Connecticut Butterfly Atlas, a field guide to all the species found in the state. He conducts field trips for area nature groups.

And he's found a new passion -- capturing, marking and releasing tiger swallowtails, the big yellow-and-black butterflies commonly found in gardens during the summer.

He now has a trove of data on the species, which he plans to publish in a scientific journal.

"He's probably got the largest stash of data on tiger swallowtails that's ever been assembled," Larry Gall of the Peabody said.

By donating his collection to the Peabody, DeMasi said, he will get a decent tax write-off. After 30 years, the collection has some value.

But he and his wife also know that all their years of chasing, catching, pinning and labeling will not be lost to mold, decay and neglect.

Instead, it will be safe and available to students and scientists who want to learn about gaudy, brilliant-winged butterflies and squat black dung beetles and the different worlds they inhabit.

"It's going to the right place," Metowski said.

Contact Robert Miller

at bmiller@newstimes.com

or at (203) 731-3345.

Butterfly Atlas The Connecticut Butterfly Atlas is a field guide to all 117 species found in the state, including photos of butterflies and caterpillars and detailed descriptions of the habitat of each species and the host plants they favor. People can buy a copy of the book by going to the state Department of Environmental Protection's Web site at www.ct.gov/dep/site/default.asp and following the links from Publications to the DEP Online Store. Some of this information is also available online. Find the Connecticut Butterfly Atlas Project, maintained by the Peabody Museum of Natural History, at www.peabody.yale.edu/collections/ent/ent_cbap.html